The key is to find a meme that is either timeless or trending right now and adapt the source to suit your needs as a brand while delighting your audience.

You can use Meme Generator to make the standard memes that most people are familiar with in no time at all.

Know Your Meme is a great resource for finding relevant memes to capitalize on and templates you can use to go beyond the traditional caption meme, and leverage some more obscure ones (you can add text easily in Powerpoint or KeyNote).

Whether you call them "gifs" or "jifs", there's no denying that GIFs are a versatile type of micro-content and a great way to grab attention.

With GIPHY, you can access a library of existing GIFs or create your own from a YouTube video or footage you shot yourself. It gives you a ton of editing options and the ability to embed your GIF hosted via GIPHY or download the source file to upload elsewhere yourself.

You can use these GIFs to entertain your audience, explain how to do something (like use a website or app), or engage with people in Facebook comments, or on Twitter.

Quote graphics, borrowed words made beautiful through design, are a great source of inspiration and motivation for many people.

And if motivation is what your brand is about (e.g. your products relate to fitness or productivity), you should consider integrating quote graphics into your social media publishing.

Canva is a great tool for making quick designs (the image above took me a literal minute to make). But it's especially handy for social posts since the optimal dimensions for each specific social platform (e.g. Instagram) are already laid out for you.

For thought-provoking quotes to use, look no further than Brainy Quotes: a repository of unforgettable lines covering a range of topics by a variety of authors, speakers, and famous people.

Whether they’re holding up a mirror to tell us who we are, testing our knowledge, or diagnosing our needs, quizzes are fun and interactive pieces of content that are actually a lot easier to make than you might think.

There are a quite a few different quiz making tools, but Qzzr is one of the most well-known and is fairly useful even on its free plan.

If your quizzes really resonate with your audience, you can consider a paid plan to start using them to get emails and convert leads. Depending on how you crafted your quiz, you can even use the answers to build "lead profiles" based on the information quiz-takers offer up, such as their favorite color and style preferences.

Qzzr lets you create 3 types of quizzes:

Personality Quizzes: Based on your answers, these quizzes match you to a personality type, celebrity or character. They tell you a bit about yourself and people love to share their results, whether they agree with them or not.

Checklist Quizzes: These quizzes simply give you an outcome based on how many items you check off, usually to help you gauge where you are on a scale.

Graded Quizzes: These are quizzes in the most traditional sense—a test you take to prove what you know (think trivia). But instead of being at the top of your class, you get to showoff to your social circle.

Quizzes offer up the potential to create a viral loop through social sharing: You take the quiz, get your result, share it with your friends, and some of them might also take the quiz, and help repeat the process.

Alternatively, you can use Typeform to create good-looking quizzes, calculators, and other interactive tools.

Last but definitely not least is Playbuzz: a platform that offers a whole suite of interactive content creation tools you can use for free.

Its focus is on letting you create interactive, embeddable Buzzfeed-style content that hooks your audience and is built for sharing. With Facebook comments and sharing integrated into the experience, it offers an inherently social-friendly experience.

There are a ton of possibilities and use cases for this tool. You can create a quiz to guide your audience through a purchase decision. Or maybe test their knowledge of your niche. Or even provide a short slideshow listicle of tips. Or write a Buzzfeed-esque post.

You also get analytics to measure the performance of the interactive content you create, and the opportunity to distribute your work to Playbuzz's network.

Browse through some examples from the Playbuzz community to see what you can create, or check out how Pride Designz used the platform in this episode of Shopify Masters.

What's Your Tool Kit for Creating Content?

Content marketing can be so much more than just blogging. You can serve up original, interactive, engaging, funny, or novel content that helps you stand out on the internet and stand apart from your competitors.

Coupled with great ideas, the tools above are handy for keeping your content marketing and social media publishing fresh and exciting over time.